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7.21.2010

By the time you read this, I will no longer be up north at the cabin. At best, I will be most of the way back home to Cambridge WI. At worst, it will be tomorrow afternoon (if you're an RSS subscriber).

But if you are lucky, you will read it. I know the stresses of the day make it tempting to skip one of my daily 10 minute posts. This is one that illustrates why that is always a bad idea.

Today I am going to tell you about the bicycle ride I am organizing for the Labor Day weekend, up at the cabin. It's a fun, social, get-away-from-it-all time.

I call it "Bike With Melinda" for a super dumb reason. On RAGBRAI in 1999, I met my friend Melinda. She had just finished biking around the country, and I thought that was pretty cool. So I came up with the idea to organize a bike ride around the "celebrity status" I associated with a person taking to America's back roads for several months to cruise around the country on a bike.

Nowawadays everybody and their uncle bikes across the country, sometimes twice! So it's not such a big deal anymore. It turns out, Melinda didn't even bike all the way across the country. She just did a few states.

Anyway, we planned the first "Bike With Melinda" for Labor Day weekend of 1999, and it was a relative success. We got a handful of people to go. I have hosted it every year since, although I don't think Melinda ever made it to one after the second one in 2000. I kept the name, "Bike With Melinda," because it sounds cool. I've tried having the ride in other locations besides up at the cabin, and it has always been kind of a disaster. There's just something about getting far far away from it all and biking with friends in the remotest part of the Wisconsin northwoods.

Not to mention the fact that there's a CABIN here we can stay at for free, and a lake right outside the door, and lots of fun stuff to do in addition to biking. My mom even cooks us food.

Like I said yesterday, the lake up here has Native American healing powers. There's also a family of grey foxes living underneath the cottage next door, a bald eagle, and possibly even a black bear with her cubs, if eye witness reports are to be believed.

I have to get going, but I will give more details on "Bike With Melinda" soon. Suffice to say, it will be Labor Day weekend 2010. The bike ride itself will be on Sunday, so people can arrive and socialize on Saturday, the easiest driving day of the weekend.